Mr Donall had called Mum, and Mum had used her evil robot voice, and Benjy had come shuffling out, covered in dust and spiderwebs. Now she was driving the two of them home – although it was more like the three of them, Jake thought, as Dad’s voice crackled on the end of the phone.
“-need you to come over,” Mum said, as she took a hard left that made Jake’s head thump against the window. “This is getting out of hand.”
“He’s just-”
“I’m not going to talk about this now.” Mum glanced in the rear-view mirror, her eyes locking onto Benjy, who was staring at his knees like he was about to punch them. “We need to sit down and deal with it. All of us. We can’t go on like this.”
Benjy tried to escape upstairs as soon as they got home, but Mum fixed him with her cyborg look and sent him slinking to the sofa. Jake hovered in the doorway, not really sure if he was meant to be there or not.
“Can I have some orange juice?” he asked after a while.
Mum barely glanced at him. “You know where it is.”
Gratefully, Jake scurried into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of orange juice from the fridge. As he took the first sip, he heard a knock at the back door.
“Dad!” Jake rushed to open the door, spilling orange juice over his hand in the process. Dad leaned down and wrapped him in a huge bear hug, and for one brief, shining moment, Jake forgot everything and the world was right.
Then Dad stepped away, and it was like waking up again.
“Where’s your brother?” Dad asked, walking towards the living room.
“In there,” Jake said, although he wasn’t sure why he’d bothered. It hadn’t been a real question.
“Right.” Dad’s voice came from the living room, nowhere near as scary as Mum’s evil robot voice, but sharp and hard all the same. “What happened, Benjy?”
“Nothing,” Benjy said sullenly.
“Well, I know that’s not true.”
As the voices rose and fell, evil robots and wailing sirens, Jake drank the rest of his orange juice, and made a sandwich out of two biscuits and three squares of chocolate, and then lay on the kitchen floor and stared at a dried old piece of pasta that was lying under the fridge. He imagined he was sinking into the fake plastic tiles, down through the concrete and deep into the earth, like a ghost sliding through a wall. Why didn’t ghosts sink, anyway? If they could walk through a wall, they could fall through a floor.
Jake rolled onto his stomach and tried to fish out the piece of pasta, but the gap was too small for his hands. For some reason, this was the worst thing that had happened all day. Jake felt the tears sting his eyes, and he rested his forehead on the gritty plastic and lay very still as the tears ran down his nose and puddled on the floor.
He didn’t know how long he lay there. He didn’t know when the voices turned from angry to tearful to kind. The silence crept up on him slowly, and he realised that he hadn’t heard anything in a very long while.
Pushing himself to his feet, Jake padded over and peeked around the door, into the living room.
Benjy was gone. Jake supposed he was upstairs. Mum and Dad were sitting together on the sofa, so still they might have been asleep. Their eyes were closed, and Mum’s head rested on Dad’s shoulder.
This wasn’t unusual, either. Not since Lizzie had gone. But it never failed to send a sick, sad feeling through Jake’s stomach. It was real, and at the same time, it wasn’t.
Jake jumped as he heard the knock on the front door. Mum and Dad started opening their eyes. Getting to her feet, Mum went into the hall, and Jake heard a click as the door opened.
“Um, hi.” A woman’s voice, one Jake didn’t know. “Robert asked me to pick him up?”
“You must be Jenna.” It wasn’t Mum’s evil robot voice, but there was still a flash of steel. “Come in. Robert, Jenna’s here.”
Mum came back in, followed by a thin white lady with very red hair and a nervous expression.
Dad peeled himself up off the sofa. “Sorry, Jenna, I didn’t realise how late it was.”
“It’s all right.” Jenna looked awkwardly at Mum. “Listen, I’ve said to Robert, but…I’m just so sorry about what’s happened.”
“Thank you,” Mum said tightly.
“If there’s anything I could do-”
“Robert has a poster you can print off,” Mum said. “If you could take some round to…well, anywhere, wherever you like…and put them up, that would be very helpful.”
Jenna nodded vigorously. “Of course. I’ll get that done right away.”
“Thank you.”
Dad gave Mum a quick peck on the cheek, and he and Jenna left the room. Jake heard the front door click shut behind them.
Mum had wrapped her arms tightly around her chest. Her head dropped forwards. Jake was already halfway across the room by the time he heard the first sob.
He hugged Mum around the waist and buried his face in her side. Mum’s hand found the back of his head, and her thumb stroked his hair.
“It’s going to be all right.”
“I know.”
Jake wasn’t even sure which one of them was saying it, let alone if it was true. It wasn’t the best moment of the day, or the worst. But at least, even if it was just for now, he wasn’t invisible.
Did you like the cover? Then try Footloose, a comic written by Alice Nuttall and drawn by Emily Brady, featuring faeries, werewolves, pirates, and the ancient and noble martial art of kung shoe.
Get updates on Alice’s other short stories and novels at Facebook and her blog, and follow her tea-addled ramblings on Twitter!
Invisible Boy Page 2
